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Chapter 4 “All the Difficulties of Forming a New Settlement” Frontier Migration, Land Speculation, and Settler Insurgency In October 1792, frontier entrepreneur and Pennsylvania land speculator Samuel Wallis led a group of men up Tunkhannock Creek to survey lands claimed by Samuel Meredith and other Philadelphia merchants. Wallis’s survey was interrupted when Wild Yankees lying in ambush fired on his workmen. No one was injured but a musket ball smacked into a tree, narrowly missing two men. Fearing for their lives, the Pennsylvanians retreated to their camp. But their ordeal was not over. After dark, a “party of Armed men with their faces black’d” surrounded the surveyors and “order[ed] themselves as they were about to Attack.” The insurgents held the Pennsylvanians at gunpoint and only released them after they promised that they would abandon their work. In accordance with their pledge, Wallis and his men struck camp and marched away the next morning.1 Wallis’s encounter is proof that Yankee resistance survived the debacle that followed the kidnapping of Timothy Pickering and reflects the forces that transformed it at the turn of the century. That the confrontation was brought on by the act of surveying—an act inextricably tied to gaining possession of, and profit from, the land—reflects how agrarian unrest in Northeast Pennsylvania was linked to the settlement of, and the market in, frontier land. Starting in the 1790s, thousands of settlers flooded into the region in search of home94 1. Linda Fossler, “Samuel Wallis: Colonial Merchant, Secret Agent,” Proceedings of the Northumblerland County Historical Society 30 (Dec. 1990): 107–15; Samuel Wallis to Samuel Meredith, Oct. 11, 1792, SCP 10:161. steads. These migrants were part of a much larger wave of pioneers who occupied and improved more frontier land in the thirty years between 1790 and 1820 than in the previous two centuries of European colonization. Entrepreneurs , sensing that there was money to be made from selling land to these immigrants , redoubled their efforts to purchase and develop property along the Pennsylvania frontier. This lively market in frontier lands, combined with heavy migration into the region, reinvigorated Yankee resistance.2 Wild Yankees renewed their fight against Pennsylvania by harnessing their insurgency to the commercial and social energies bound up in frontier expansion . In the last decade of the eighteenth century, the Connecticut claim attracted speculators who wanted to take advantage of America’s robust land market and thus gained advocates who had the means to fill northern Pennsylvania with Yankee immigrants. Reinforced by this growing body of recruits, Wild Yankees overwhelmed isolated Pennsylvania claimants and dominated local governmental and judicial institutions. Instead of resisting the imposition of Pennsylvania’s political institutions as they had done in the past, Yankee rebels now used them to serve their own ends. More than ever, Yankee resistance depended on the combined efforts of settlers and speculators. Yankee settlers and Susquehannah Company speculators, though they possessed different aims and aspirations, continued to find a common ground in their mutual opposition to Pennsylvania.3 In the closing years of the eighteenth century, this coalition of frontier yeomen and eastern entrepreneurs intensified the challenge to Pennsylvania’s authority and dramatically expanded the geographical scope of Yankee resistance. “A Matter of Great Speculation” Pennsylvania contributed to the revival of Wild Yankee resistance when it repealed the Confirming Act in 1790. The act, which had promised to legitimate “All the Difficulties of Forming a New Settlement” 95 2. Much has been written about America’s post-Revolutionary land boom. Works pertinent to this study include Norman B. Wilkinson, Land Policy and Speculation in Pennsylvania, 1779–1800: A Test of the New Democracy (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1958); Wilkinson , “The ‘Philadelphia Fever’ in Northern Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History 20 (Jan. 1953): 41–56; and William Wyckoff, The Developer’s Frontier: The Making of the Western New York Landscape (New Haven, CT, 1988). For insights into the link between frontier speculation and agrarian unrest, see Alan Taylor, “Agrarian Independence: Northern Land Rioters after the Revolution,” in Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (DeKalb, IL, 1993), 232–33. 3. Alan Taylor, “ ‘To Man Their Rights’: The Frontier Revolution,” in The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, VA, 1995), 233–36, 244–46. [3.145.60.149] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 02:05 GMT...

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